The people who are willing to leave one country to live in another are the hardest working and most creative, the very ones an immigration policy should encourage. The ones who were born here and want to shut the doors are the dumbest and least imaginative and the most likely to cause grief for employers by demanding what's theirs by birthright. Following that logic, policy should be to welcome immigrants and require natural born citizens to prove they deserve the benefits of living there or being evicted.
Or maybe you have paid the natives what they are owed by your ancestors stealing the land from them.
Or maybe you are just full of yourself and don't have a clue.
Because the H1B holders are as close to indentured servants as it gets these days. Their H1B visas are tied to their jobs -- if they lose their jobs, they have something like two weeks to find a new job or leave the country.
Employers like that bludgeon to hold against employees. Work your ass off for less pay, don't cause trouble, and in a few years you might be able to stay here on your own. I'd like to see a plot of how many H1B employees are laid off or fired vs time with the H1B. I bet there'd be a spike near the end. I bet a plot of hires vs time in visa would show hiring falling off near the end of the visa time. Why hire an H1B who only has a few months of servitude remaining? On the other hand, those within such close reach of a permanent visa might just be more desperate and more willing to take crappy terms.
Proper H1B reform would start with applying the visa to the employee, not the job. You'd see corporate interest in hiring H1B holders drop like a rock. That should tell you something.
There are far too many differences among countries for those statistics to mean anything. You can find any number of interesting correlations, but none of them mean anything; some are blatantly useless, others appear meaningful, and there is nothing to distinguish uesless from meaningful other than preconceived notions of what to expect.
Guns are the great equalizers: swords and arrows require a heckuva lot more practice to become proficient than guns. It's no wonder governments are afraid of mere citizens having them. What is surprising is the number of ordinary people who have nothing to fear from guns but a lot to fear from governments who have somehow managed to swallow the government anti-gun propaganda. Think for yourself.
People using guns save far more lives and prevent far more crimes than do criminals using guns. Studies show anywhere from 1.5 million (by the gun hating CDC) to 2.5 million (by a gun loving professor) crimes prevented by the use of guns, usually no more than the criminal seeing it or hearing it, seldom by actually using it. Most gun crimes in the US are by criminals on criminals. Cars kill far more people.
Considering there are more guns in the US than cars, 300 million of them, one per citizen, they are used incredibly safely. Those who think guns are bad no doubt must think worse of cars.
And the most fun gun statistic in the US: if you have one neighbor with guns and one neighbor with a swimming pool, your kids are seven times as likely to die in the pool neighbor's pool than from the gun neighbor's guns.
The range (20cm) is so short that keeping the gun ANYWHERE other than in your hand (such as a holster) means it needs the pin entered to work. The Heller decision already said that a nonfunctioning gun is not a gun for purposes of the second amendment, so thiere's a good chance this won't fly. Hint: read the part of the transcript where the DC attorney says that a disassembled gun is ok because the city won't prosecute for assembling the gun when faced by an intruder (which is wrong; the city HAS prosecuted for that crime), and one of the justices says ok, so first he has to turn on the nightstand light, get his reading glasses, put the gun together, load it, and now he's ready to use it...
I do not think you understand the purpose of guns. You only understand that they scare you and you don't think anyone should have anything which scares you.
Democrats want your money but not your morals (mostly).
Republicans want your morals but not your money (mostly).
Both want to tell you how to live your life. Face it, by definition politicians think they know better than the voters how to run the country, ie everyone else's life. Everyone else has too much to do to waste time that way.
My feelings too. Interesting to live during this transition. The Chinese are making such rapid progress because a whole lot of their booming economy is simply catchup, like refrigerators, washing machines, good housing, cars, infrastructures, etc. As people get stability in their lives and have assured material goods, they also have more free time and disposable income, and they are not as happy letting the government control their lives. True research doesn't come from government directives, but from people pursuing their own interests. The closer their science gets to western standards, the less it can copy, the more originality it will need, and that requires freedom. So far, the communist party seems to be doing a fairly good dance between keeping control and letting go, but the dance is going to need ever more skill as the economy grows.
Wars often start between the best trading partners
The examples you cite are wrong. Those so-called trading partners were nowhere near "partners"; their wars started over exclusive access to markets and resources. The true trading you see now between China and the rest of the world makes their economies far too intertwined for war to have any economic sense. If China were to invade Taiwan for example, they would lose all that expertise and capacity and not only damage their and all other economies, but the rest of the world would shun them enough to drag the world into a second 1930s style depression. Note that this shunning would not be for moral principles, but because the Chinese would no longer be reliable business partners.
Let's get this straight. You argue that when politics (nee religion) strangles a line of research, and that line of research subsequently produces few results, that is justification for continuing to strangle that line of research?
If only the religious nuts would apply that principle to themselves.
Oh go away. Read up on the spying they did to augment their research. They may have had "one of the best" but there weren't very many, and they got tremendous help from all their spies. Sure they could have got the bombs without the spying, but not as quickly. Even with that, they were still four years behind.
For the car analogy, it;s like driving a twisty road at night. You can do it a lot faster when you see taillights ahead, because not only do they give you clues about curves and hills, they give you confidence that the road exists and is in good condition -- you are on the right track.
Because that gives an advantage to people who do well at public speaking -- and that includes not just good speakers, but those who dress well, those who look good, and many other attributes which should not be part of the presentation.
There is also the matter of decisions made during the trial -- objections to what the other side says, objections to bench rulings. All sorts of legal matters come up during the trial itself.
It would be nice if the facts could be laid out simply and the presentation didn't matter. But you'd have to present both sides to each other and the judge, then revise them in view of objections etc. It's an interesting idea, trial by paper instead of by speaking, and maybe it would work. Hadn't thought of that.
I hate the fact that money buys justice. I propose that neither side can spend more than the other without loaning the other the difference, and loser pays. If I sue MegaCrp for a legit complaint and they bring in ten lawyers to my one, that is hardly justice. They must offer to loan me what it takes to hire a full team. If I decline the offer, they are limited to one lawyer, just like me. If I take their offer and win, they don't get their money back, and they owe me for the one lawyer I paid for. If I lose, I owe them the fees for 19 lawyers. If they think I am not able to repay their loan and/or their own costs, they should not offer the loan and should restrict themselves to equal costs, or even less -- hire a cheap lawyer and make me loan them the difference, and if I can't afford that, I have to reduce my lawyering costs to match.
Same thing applies if they sue me.
Obviously you have to have some leeway; you can't demand matching down to the penny. You also have to have some auditing to eliminate padding and lies. But cases where MegaCorp brings in a full fancy team against a single lawyer is blatantly wrong.
I especially like the idea that it encourages keeping expenses small. The more you spend, the more you have to loan, and the more the other side spends. You can't simply swamp the other side with expensive investigations.
You have to combine with with loser pays or it is pointless.
I have had my own domain since uunet! days. I drop connections when the envelope header is to a non-existent account. There are very few valid accounts on this domain. Here are the last three days stats on dropped and accepted connections (D dropped, N accepted):
D/837,780 N/941 D/935,298 N/884 D/901,749 N/832
This is 1 valid email out of 1000 attempts to a first approximation, 99.9% spam. Even with these, I still get several hundred validly addressed spams a day, most automatically junked altho I still scan the Subjects and Froms in case the odd transient correspondent was not white listed.
The bogus account names are complete nonsense, just tossing out names and seeing which ones stick.
People skim magazine covers at a newsstand or the grocery store checkout, and the publishers must know this or they wouldn't put enticing headlines on the cover.
People look at the headlines in newspaper racks, that's why the newspaper put those headlines there.
And guess what? There's even a newspaper-specific piece of jargon for this: Above The Fold.
Do these modern day publishers have any institutional knowledge? It looks like NOT.
I have never understood why bands spend months recording 30 minutes of music when they perform the same music live ALL THE FREAKING TIME. I myself would rather hear live music than stale perfection. How many takes do you have to splice to make one single recording -- how can you even call it your music any more when it is the recording editor who does all the hard work of listening for pointless variations in takes to make a recording which is going to be heard thru earbuds anyway?
I know why. It's because labels are parasites and have to make money off musicians somehow, and the easy days of controlling airplay and distribution are gone. It's got to come from somewhere, so they put it in the contract that you have to spend x hours in the studio to produce an album.
I don't expect bands to produce an album in one day, but months? Sorry, you are letting them rip you off. I would rather listen to a good band produce their own stuff in their garage or even rent a studio themselves for just a few days, and use a Mac to edit it themselves. Wake up! This is an age where YOU can control your own destiny. Stop signing slave contracts with labels and then making up excuses for their abominable behavior.
I have no respect for bands who sell their souls in exchange for the very remote possibility of being the next megahit. Just do what you do, be good, have fun, make a good enough living, and if you become superstars, great, but don't sell your souls to let the parasites make that decision based merely on how much of a toady you can be. If you want the parasites to decide your life for you, you are no longer artists.
The former head of the RIAA, Hillary Rosen, actually gave a speech decrying the very idea of libraries loaning out books for free. She seriously wanted to charge for every time a book was read.
No, I have no link. It was probably ten years ago. She resigned in 2003.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who are willing to leave one country to live in another are the hardest working and most creative, the very ones an immigration policy should encourage. The ones who were born here and want to shut the doors are the dumbest and least imaginative and the most likely to cause grief for employers by demanding what's theirs by birthright. Following that logic, policy should be to welcome immigrants and require natural born citizens to prove they deserve the benefits of living there or being evicted.
Or maybe you have paid the natives what they are owed by your ancestors stealing the land from them.
Or maybe you are just full of yourself and don't have a clue.
Because the H1B holders are as close to indentured servants as it gets these days. Their H1B visas are tied to their jobs -- if they lose their jobs, they have something like two weeks to find a new job or leave the country.
Employers like that bludgeon to hold against employees. Work your ass off for less pay, don't cause trouble, and in a few years you might be able to stay here on your own. I'd like to see a plot of how many H1B employees are laid off or fired vs time with the H1B. I bet there'd be a spike near the end. I bet a plot of hires vs time in visa would show hiring falling off near the end of the visa time. Why hire an H1B who only has a few months of servitude remaining? On the other hand, those within such close reach of a permanent visa might just be more desperate and more willing to take crappy terms.
Proper H1B reform would start with applying the visa to the employee, not the job. You'd see corporate interest in hiring H1B holders drop like a rock. That should tell you something.
He's famous. You could google him. Might even learn something.
There are far too many differences among countries for those statistics to mean anything. You can find any number of interesting correlations, but none of them mean anything; some are blatantly useless, others appear meaningful, and there is nothing to distinguish uesless from meaningful other than preconceived notions of what to expect.
Guns are the great equalizers: swords and arrows require a heckuva lot more practice to become proficient than guns. It's no wonder governments are afraid of mere citizens having them. What is surprising is the number of ordinary people who have nothing to fear from guns but a lot to fear from governments who have somehow managed to swallow the government anti-gun propaganda. Think for yourself.
People using guns save far more lives and prevent far more crimes than do criminals using guns. Studies show anywhere from 1.5 million (by the gun hating CDC) to 2.5 million (by a gun loving professor) crimes prevented by the use of guns, usually no more than the criminal seeing it or hearing it, seldom by actually using it. Most gun crimes in the US are by criminals on criminals. Cars kill far more people.
Considering there are more guns in the US than cars, 300 million of them, one per citizen, they are used incredibly safely. Those who think guns are bad no doubt must think worse of cars.
And the most fun gun statistic in the US: if you have one neighbor with guns and one neighbor with a swimming pool, your kids are seven times as likely to die in the pool neighbor's pool than from the gun neighbor's guns.
Dick Heller's gun is a .22.
The range (20cm) is so short that keeping the gun ANYWHERE other than in your hand (such as a holster) means it needs the pin entered to work. The Heller decision already said that a nonfunctioning gun is not a gun for purposes of the second amendment, so thiere's a good chance this won't fly. Hint: read the part of the transcript where the DC attorney says that a disassembled gun is ok because the city won't prosecute for assembling the gun when faced by an intruder (which is wrong; the city HAS prosecuted for that crime), and one of the justices says ok, so first he has to turn on the nightstand light, get his reading glasses, put the gun together, load it, and now he's ready to use it ...
I do not think you understand the purpose of guns. You only understand that they scare you and you don't think anyone should have anything which scares you.
Must have spent too much time reading TFB.
It would be compounding their evility if the carriers removed the evil bit.
Would google be evil for forging it back in?
Would the carriers be evil again for reremoving it?
Minds boggle, at least mine.
Democrats want your money but not your morals (mostly).
Republicans want your morals but not your money (mostly).
Both want to tell you how to live your life. Face it, by definition politicians think they know better than the voters how to run the country, ie everyone else's life. Everyone else has too much to do to waste time that way.
My feelings too. Interesting to live during this transition. The Chinese are making such rapid progress because a whole lot of their booming economy is simply catchup, like refrigerators, washing machines, good housing, cars, infrastructures, etc. As people get stability in their lives and have assured material goods, they also have more free time and disposable income, and they are not as happy letting the government control their lives. True research doesn't come from government directives, but from people pursuing their own interests. The closer their science gets to western standards, the less it can copy, the more originality it will need, and that requires freedom. So far, the communist party seems to be doing a fairly good dance between keeping control and letting go, but the dance is going to need ever more skill as the economy grows.
Not relative to the free countries. A few big breakthroughs are nothing compared to the zillions made in the free countries.
You name a few Soviet breakthroughs and I will name ten for every one of yours.
Wars often start between the best trading partners
The examples you cite are wrong. Those so-called trading partners were nowhere near "partners"; their wars started over exclusive access to markets and resources. The true trading you see now between China and the rest of the world makes their economies far too intertwined for war to have any economic sense. If China were to invade Taiwan for example, they would lose all that expertise and capacity and not only damage their and all other economies, but the rest of the world would shun them enough to drag the world into a second 1930s style depression. Note that this shunning would not be for moral principles, but because the Chinese would no longer be reliable business partners.
Let's get this straight. You argue that when politics (nee religion) strangles a line of research, and that line of research subsequently produces few results, that is justification for continuing to strangle that line of research?
If only the religious nuts would apply that principle to themselves.
Oh go away. Read up on the spying they did to augment their research. They may have had "one of the best" but there weren't very many, and they got tremendous help from all their spies. Sure they could have got the bombs without the spying, but not as quickly. Even with that, they were still four years behind.
For the car analogy, it;s like driving a twisty road at night. You can do it a lot faster when you see taillights ahead, because not only do they give you clues about curves and hills, they give you confidence that the road exists and is in good condition -- you are on the right track.
Because that gives an advantage to people who do well at public speaking -- and that includes not just good speakers, but those who dress well, those who look good, and many other attributes which should not be part of the presentation.
There is also the matter of decisions made during the trial -- objections to what the other side says, objections to bench rulings. All sorts of legal matters come up during the trial itself.
It would be nice if the facts could be laid out simply and the presentation didn't matter. But you'd have to present both sides to each other and the judge, then revise them in view of objections etc. It's an interesting idea, trial by paper instead of by speaking, and maybe it would work. Hadn't thought of that.
I hate the fact that money buys justice. I propose that neither side can spend more than the other without loaning the other the difference, and loser pays. If I sue MegaCrp for a legit complaint and they bring in ten lawyers to my one, that is hardly justice. They must offer to loan me what it takes to hire a full team. If I decline the offer, they are limited to one lawyer, just like me. If I take their offer and win, they don't get their money back, and they owe me for the one lawyer I paid for. If I lose, I owe them the fees for 19 lawyers. If they think I am not able to repay their loan and/or their own costs, they should not offer the loan and should restrict themselves to equal costs, or even less -- hire a cheap lawyer and make me loan them the difference, and if I can't afford that, I have to reduce my lawyering costs to match.
Same thing applies if they sue me.
Obviously you have to have some leeway; you can't demand matching down to the penny. You also have to have some auditing to eliminate padding and lies. But cases where MegaCorp brings in a full fancy team against a single lawyer is blatantly wrong.
I especially like the idea that it encourages keeping expenses small. The more you spend, the more you have to loan, and the more the other side spends. You can't simply swamp the other side with expensive investigations.
You have to combine with with loser pays or it is pointless.
No, they are so small that they will evaporate far too fast for any accidental growth to even be noticed.
So a future Nero could be playing the accompaniment to destruction on the instrument of destruction itself.
Don't you mean WTFV?
I have had my own domain since uunet! days. I drop connections when the envelope header is to a non-existent account. There are very few valid accounts on this domain. Here are the last three days stats on dropped and accepted connections (D dropped, N accepted):
D/837,780 N/941
D/935,298 N/884
D/901,749 N/832
This is 1 valid email out of 1000 attempts to a first approximation, 99.9% spam. Even with these, I still get several hundred validly addressed spams a day, most automatically junked altho I still scan the Subjects and Froms in case the odd transient correspondent was not white listed.
The bogus account names are complete nonsense, just tossing out names and seeing which ones stick.
People skim magazine covers at a newsstand or the grocery store checkout, and the publishers must know this or they wouldn't put enticing headlines on the cover.
People look at the headlines in newspaper racks, that's why the newspaper put those headlines there.
And guess what? There's even a newspaper-specific piece of jargon for this: Above The Fold.
Do these modern day publishers have any institutional knowledge? It looks like NOT.
I have never understood why bands spend months recording 30 minutes of music when they perform the same music live ALL THE FREAKING TIME. I myself would rather hear live music than stale perfection. How many takes do you have to splice to make one single recording -- how can you even call it your music any more when it is the recording editor who does all the hard work of listening for pointless variations in takes to make a recording which is going to be heard thru earbuds anyway?
I know why. It's because labels are parasites and have to make money off musicians somehow, and the easy days of controlling airplay and distribution are gone. It's got to come from somewhere, so they put it in the contract that you have to spend x hours in the studio to produce an album.
I don't expect bands to produce an album in one day, but months? Sorry, you are letting them rip you off. I would rather listen to a good band produce their own stuff in their garage or even rent a studio themselves for just a few days, and use a Mac to edit it themselves. Wake up! This is an age where YOU can control your own destiny. Stop signing slave contracts with labels and then making up excuses for their abominable behavior.
I have no respect for bands who sell their souls in exchange for the very remote possibility of being the next megahit. Just do what you do, be good, have fun, make a good enough living, and if you become superstars, great, but don't sell your souls to let the parasites make that decision based merely on how much of a toady you can be. If you want the parasites to decide your life for you, you are no longer artists.
The former head of the RIAA, Hillary Rosen, actually gave a speech decrying the very idea of libraries loaning out books for free. She seriously wanted to charge for every time a book was read.
No, I have no link. It was probably ten years ago. She resigned in 2003.
You're probably the only one old enough to remember that.